It seems as if marketers move further and further away from direct buys and fall more into the world of programmatic buying. An article on Ad Exchanger by Sarah Sluis states that 87% of brands and agencies plan to spend 50% more on programmatic ad buys. Advertising Age is projecting that $9.8 billion will be spent on Programmatic buying in the U.S. in the next year. This includes mobile, video and desktop placements.
If you are not familiar with programmatic buying, it is the automated process of buying ads online, connecting advertisers to placement inventory.
Today’s world is a technology driven society, using the Internet at least once a day (as a matter of fact, you are probably within an arm’s length of an Internet-driven device right now). Whether it is on a mobile device, desktop or tablet, we all are subjected to seeing at least one advertisement per day. So why is programmatic advertising the better alternative for your marketing dollars?
For one, marketing campaigns can be much more strategic. With programmatic buying, you pay only for the audience you want to reach rather than paying for a large amount of impressions hoping to reach your target audience. For example, let’s say you are a shoe company with great sales on red high heels. You then decide to put those red high heels in a display advertisement (take it from me, who’s not looking for a good pair of red high heels?). If you expose your brand to the right target audience, driven by programmatic buying, those consumers will remember you as the brand that has red high heels when the Holidays come around. Consumers see advertisements all day across multiple sites, and at the end of the day, when they are ready to buy a product, they will remember your brand. Programmatic buying will allow you to remind them of your product on all devices, while continually optimizing towards the better performing placements.
Programmatic buying also allows the marketer to optimize the audience towards a specific goal since each conversion, click or impression data is available in real-time. This instant data flow allows the marketer to make better use of their marketing budget and extend their overall campaign strategy. Each marketing tactic can be adjusted in real-time based on insights of the converters or clickers, ultimately creating that opportunity to push the consumer further down the funnel, resulting in an increased ROI.
You will be happy to know programmatic buying can actually save money. Due to real-time bidding, advertisers now have the power to set their bid based on how valuable that impression is and at that exact moment. Gone are the days of having the direct publisher site set the CPM. As the advertiser, you now have complete control of your campaign.
With an ‘always-on’ state of mind, the consumer will be reached at every stage of the conversion funnel making a prospect, a customer.
